An invitation from the publishing Mafia?

Keith S. Taber

Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay 

Another sign of the challenges to academic integrity that has been the theme of several recent blogs:

I copy below the text of an email I recently received. This is a genuine message (i.e., I reproduce the text exactly as I received it.)

What I am not sure about is

  • is it a serious request for me to be involved in academic malpractice?
  • is it a scam, that seems to be a scheme to get around proper peer review, but if I respond I will soon find I am being blackmailed with a threat to reveal my being complicit in such a scheme, or
  • is it a joke?

It seems a lot of effort to go to if it is just a joke (the website looks like it has had some time and effort spent on it), but when I got to the organisation name at the bottom, I found am being approached by an organisation calling itself 'journals-mafia'!

"Keith S Taber

Are you an editor of the journal or a member of editorial board?
If so, we propose a big profit for you and your journal.
The profit is from 1,000 up to 10,000 dollars per a month.

It is necessary to publish articles.
The same work that you do, but you can get more money doing this with us.

My company works in the markets of Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, China and Iran.
We publish a lot of articles.
There is much more demand than we can publish.
We do not have enough journals in which we can publish all the articles.

That is why we are searching more and more journals for publication every day.
We will share our profits with you.

An alternative option is to buy your journal.
If your journal does not bring you joy no longer, we will buy it.

The scheme of our work is simple:

1. The author writes an article.

2. The author pays us for publishing an article in a journal.

3. We work with the text of the article; we review and edit this article making it of excellent quality.

4. We check the quality of English language.

5. We format an article according to the requirements of a journal.

6. We send an article to the editor of the journal.

7. The article is published.

8. We share our profit with the editor of the journal.

Win – Win – Win.
All the parties are satisfied.

We work with a huge amount [sic] of articles.
We work not only with people who need a publication.
We also work with the universities and scientific organizations, which give us from 10 to 100 articles.

We have several companies.
This makes it possible not to attract the attention of scientific databases as well as controlling and regulating organizations.

We know how Scopus and Clarivate Analytics (Web of Science) work.
We earn money and do not draw their attention.
More details will be provided below.

My goal is to monopolize publication market of Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. All the publications must go through my companies, through my journals or partner journals.

How will we build our joint business?
The options are possible:

1. For high ranking journals.

2. For low ranking journals.

3. For predatory journals.

A high ranking journal.
We prepare an article adhering to all journal's requirements.
The quality of the article is excellent.
We put 1 article from our region for one issue.
Thus, we provide from 1 to 5 articles for an issue (no more than one article from one country):
one is from Russia, one – from Azerbaijan, one – from China, one – from Kazakhstan, etc.
This will not cause any suspicion. Any journal is interested to publish articles from different countries.
The article is under review.
We correct and edit the article taking into the account the reviewers' comments and remarks.
The article is published.
The profit is shared.

Low ranking journals.
We prepare an article adhering to all journal's requirements.
We put several article for one issue.
If we do not want to attract attention, to work for years and to raise the journal's ranking, then we send from 1 to 15 articles for one issue (no more than three articles from one country).
All the articles should undergo the review stage.
We have our own team of reviewers (more than 100 reviewers from around the world).
We can review the articles by our reviewers.
We correct and edit the article taking into the account the reviewers' comments and remarks.
If you follow the process,
this will not cause any suspicion.
The article is published.
The profit is shared.
In this case, the editor of a journal agrees not to publish articles from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan bypassing us. All scientists of these countries pass only through us.
Profit is divided.

Predatory journals.
If you have exactly decided that you want to get a lot of money.
In this case, the journal will be removed from the Scopus base in the future.
In this case, we take the articles in hundreds or thousands.
And publish them.
In this case, the editor of a journal agrees not to publish articles from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan bypassing us. All scientists of these countries pass only through us.
Profit is divided.

Business is working like this. It is reliable and approved by time.

If you have any ideas, please, write to me.
If you are interested, please, write to me.

Additional important information.
We care not only for our reputation, but also for the reputation of our partners and clients.
We are several companies registered in different countries.
There are different kinds of activity of our companies according to official documents. It depends on the inquiries of our clients and partners.
Under individual requests, new companies can be established or existing companies registered several years ago can be used.
The purpose of invoice and the subject of the contract can be formulated individually.
We pay journals in any ways that are convenient for them: PayPal, electronic money, bank cards, bank accounts, without a contract, under a contract, SWIFT, etc.

Nataliya"

First published 19th May 2018 at http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/kst24/

Author: Keith

Former school and college science teacher, teacher educator, research supervisor, and research methods lecturer. Emeritus Professor of Science Education at the University of Cambridge.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Discover more from Science-Education-Research

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading